An ongoing adventure of travel and living while using a wheelchair. Tim has been disabled from birth. Darryl is his father and caregiver who travels with him.
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It's another stop on the wide world of beer as Tim and I put three tripels to the test. A tripel (or triple, or trippel...depeding on how the brewery wants to spell it) is simply defined as a Belgian strong ale. Why tripel? It's hard to pin down. My research points up to two reasonable explanations...
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1. It's got more alcohol than a dubbel, which has more than a regular ale. Legend has it that this is where the "X" in describing alcohol. A keg of Belgian ale would have an "X" for a regular ale, "XX" on the keg for the next level of strength, and "XXX" for the strongest.
2. It uses triple the amount of malt in the fermentation...this is the description New Belgium Brewery uses on their entry, so I'd give that some credence too.
Today, we've got a true Belgian Abbey Tripel in the Petrus Gouden Tripel and two American contenders. New Belgium...you might be familiar with their Fat Tire brand...from Colorado with their trippel, which they also add a little coriander to, and Andersen Valley Ale from Boonville in Northern California, near Ukiah and Mendocino.
All were very good but one really stood above the others for superior taste and drinkability...and it's probably not the one you guessed.
See the video above for the whole tasting and see who came in head and shoulders above the others in this strong ale taste off.
To me, Belgium is the beer capitol of the world. In this small country, over 250 breweries make the best beer on earth. Today, we’re tasting a tiny sliver of that tradition with our Belgian sour ale taste off.
Belgium is divided into two linguistic regions, Wallonia and Flanders. French is spoken in Wallonia and Flemish (similar to German) is spoken in the northern region. This area along the Dutch border is where the sour ales generally hail from.
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Sour ale is a beer that, just like the name says, tastes sour. Sometimes it’s just a hint of sourness and other times you’ll think you’re swilling vinegar. It’s definitely an acquired taste for most people. It’s a taste I’m trying to acquire…sour beer is pretty difficult for me to get a handle on. My wife, on the other hand, loves sour ales and it’s her favorite beer type. Unfortunately for her, most beer drinkers in our area aren’t big fans of the stuff so it’s pretty hard to find.
We’re lucky that we have a few pubs nearby that serve a selection of Belgian beers. One, Lucky Baldwin’s, has a Belgian Beer Festival each year and this is where my wife found out she liked the sours.
Today, we’re tasting two ales. Monk’s Café is a Flemish sour ale. Brewed just south of the Dutch border, it’s made especially for Monk’s Café, a Belgian restaurant in Philadelphia. It come out a dark, copper color with a nice, 1 inch head. The sour taste is not overwhelming and is not sweet like some of the Flemish ales you find available around here, like the krieks you get at Trader Joe’s.
The second ale is Duchesse de Bourgogne, a Flanders red ale. This one is a little sourer but still drinkable to me. It’s just slightly redder than Monk’s. It’s brewed farther south, about 50 miles south of Brugges.
At BevMo, the Monk’s Café sour ale is about $3.50 a bottle and Duchesse de Bourgogne is $5.49.
Luckily, we got a ride to and from today’s adventure. Good thing…there was no way we were going to end this one sober…
Milwaukee is the city that beer made famous, so how does it stack up to the self-described “Napa Valley of beer” that we visited last year (Denver)? Very well, thank you.
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We start off with a standalone visit to Benelux in the Historic Third Ward. Yes, you need to capitalize each word.
With a thick bible of beers to choose from, Tim and I have a palette of strong Belgian beers while Letty goes with a bottled sour. It’s hard to pick from our palette but Letty says the sour, Ichtegem Flemish Red, could have more bite.
Next, it’s on to the actual crawl. We start at the north end of town where the really cool Milwaukee Riverwalk starts. First up is the American absinthe made right here in Milwaukee by Great Lakes Distillery and served at Trocadero. It’s the first time we’ve had it and it tastes like anisette and looks like cloudy water. Not bad but not really my cup of tea either. I enjoyed the shot of Cazadores Reposado I had better.
Across the adjacent Hudson Street bridge, which has a really cool, wheelchair accessible, pedestrian bridge hanging under the main bridge, we go to Lakefront Brewery to take the tour. This tour is so fun that it is rated as the number 4 best thing to do in Milwaukee on Tripadvisor. It should be number 1.
Our tour guide is hungover and drunk, but he’s funny, knowledgeable, and keeps our glasses full of our choice of Lakefront brews. I’m partial to their flagship variety, the Stein.
Seven dollars gets you on the tour and four tokens for beer. Answering trivia questions or helping the tour guide gets you more tokens, plus the generous policy of free frequent top-offs means there is much more beer available that most people can handle. I ended up giving my last four tokens away.
Walking along the river, we eventually end up in another historic neighborhood, Third Street…also known as Historic Old World Third Street. Yes, with the capitals.
Mader’s has been here over a century, serving good but expensive German Cuisine. They also have a happy hour so we go inside to enjoy a $5 ceramic stein of Spaten Oktoberfest and a glass of Pinot Noir.
Afterward, it’s a couple of doors down to get some more Lakefront beer (two mugs for $3) and some Franziskaner Weissbier at Milwaukee Brat House along with some of their namesake fatty sausages and deep fried cheese curds.
With that, we cannot crawl another foot and call for the hotel shuttle to take us back. It’s all in the video above, so come along and watch as we take in as much Milwaukee as we can handle.
Felt like something different for this week's Cocktail Hour so I decided to expand upon our original Belgians on Ice post.
Today, I needed to go to the store for some groceries and remembered that the Stater Brothers in Glendora is right next door to Lone Hill Liquor, home to a vast array of beers.
Letty likes the sours, so I'm looking for something she'll enjoy without breaking the bank like the sour rye I see from the Bruery that goes for around $24 for a 750 ml. bottle. There is a great selections here and I end up settling for the Rodenbach Grand Cru at about half the price of the Bruery's version.
For me, it's been a long time since I've enjoyed a St. Bernardus brew, so I go with the hyper-strong ABT 12, which clocks in at 10% alcohol.
First the sour...Rodenbach is a classic Flemish Red Ale made in Roeselare, Belgium. It's sour, real sour with...as my wife says...no hint of sweetness at all. That's fine with her as she likes her sour ales as sour as possible. It's aged over two years in oak barrels and has added bacteria to impart that tartness.
When it hits the tongue, the first thought is vinegar, like the malt vinegar you put on fish and chips, but let it linger a little bit and you'll find a rich savoriness in the background that's quite interesting.
I admit, I'm still developing my taste for the sour ales but each time I try, I like it a little more.
The St. Bernardus is an abbey ale, a quadruppel, which goes down very smooth like a good Belgian dubbel like Petrus or Kwak. It explodes with a rich, deep, almost sweet taste that goes down like velvet.
At 10% alcohol, this one will kick your ass if you're not careful...I think I'll need a nap after this bottle. Only drink it if you're somewhere you won't have to drive from any time soon.
Today on the patio were chillin’ some brews. A couple of Belgian beauties.
Belgium is our favorite beer making country, followed closely by Germany and the good ole USA. Today, we’re trying an abbey brewed reserve ale and a Lambic. Both are readily available, today’s bottles came from Trader Joe’s.
The Lambic is Lindemans Framboise raspberry Lambic and the ale is Chimay Grande Reserve.
First the Lambic. These are mainly sour beers often fortified with fruit. Letty loves the sour Belgians, I think they taste like vinegar. It’s an acquired taste for me but some people really love it. This one is not sour, though. It’s actually pretty sweet and tastes more like a raspberry soda. Not sour enough for Letty and too sweet for me. The raspberries give it a deep red color and it looks like punch.
The Chimay is a rich, brown, smooth tasting beer. It’s not very clear, almost a Guinness like thick brown that blots out the sun. It is very smooth, like you’d expect a Belgian to be, and tastes just a little hoppy and a lot nutty. Not a bad brew but there are better out there, although they are not as readily available.
The Lambic is $8 and the Chimay $9 for a 750 ml bottle at Trader Joe’s.
Pictured above are the two ales we're tasting today.
On the left is Trader Joe's 2010 Vintage Ale. Each year the popular grocery store chain commissions a new ale for the holidays. This year's version is a Belgian style brown ale produced by Unibroue in Canada.
To the right is Zoetzuur, a Flemish sour ale. You've really got to have a taste for this type of Belgian ale. Letty does. She loves them and wishes they were more widely available here in the states. I don't. I'm trying to develop a taste but so far the varieties I've tried are either cloyingly sweet (like Framboise) or tastes like vinegar.
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Zoetzuur is brewed by De Proefbrouweri in Lochristi-Hijfte, Belgium. It's a small town near the Dutch border, north of Gent. The ale clocks in at 7% alcohol and is served in a cork top bottle. It's head foams up about an inch and has a lighter golden brown color.
For taste, it's a little off. True, I'm not a sour ale afficiandao, but Letty is and she agrees. There's a quick taste of, what I think of as, grape soda. Letty does not taste that but we both agree that there's an off-smell and taste. Kind of like a skunky beer but different. Something that we went back and forth on as to what exactly it was. We ended up agreeing that it is the smell and taste of a horse farm.
At $10.99 for a 750 ml bottle, it's just not worth the price. Letty is still looking for a good, sour ale that she can get on a regular basis. Rodenbach is one of her favorites but hard to find and the Bruery supposedly makes one of the finest sours around but they ran out and it will be over a year (!) till their next batch is ready.
The Trader Joe's Vintage Ale 2010, on the other hand, continues the strong tradition of great ales released each holiday season. It's a dark, dark beer but not heavy. Extremely foamy like the time I used regular granulated sugar to ferment some homemade beer, the head grows very fast so you need to do a careful pour.
The taste is smooth, the ingredients very harmonious. The bitterness just hits the back of your throat on it's way down the way a nice, cold Coke Classic does. I like this beer quite a bit and at 9% alcohol content, it's no lightweight. It's also a very good bargain at only $4.99 for a 750 ml corked bottle. I'll be going back to buy a few more.
It's time to wrap up this trilogy. I made it my project to brew a batch of Belgian style dubbel ale.
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I brewed and fermented it in Part 1. I filtered and bottled it in Part 2. Now it's time to see how I did. Tim joins me as we crack open a couple of bottles on New Year's Eve. It tasted very, very good but... You'll need to watch the video to see how it turned out.
Cheers! Darryl Copyright 2013 - Darryl Musick All Rights Reserved
In part 1, we brewed our Belgian Dubbel Ale. It's been two weeks, fermentation is complete, and it's time to bottle.
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We must transfer the completed beer into another tank, mainly to filter out the bits of dead yeast and other bits, and then it's just a matter of pouring into bottles, pressing caps on them, and waiting. It'll take another couple of weeks of bottle aging and conditioning until it's ready to drink. At that time, Tim and I will taste test them for you. Cheers! Darryl Copyright 2012 - Darryl Musick All Rights Reserved.
Once in awhile, I like to really get into creating something to drink. I don't mean just trying to invent a new cocktail, although that is a lot of fun. I mean creating something from scratch, like a moonshiner.
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No White Lightning for me, though. This is a little more tame. Today, I'm making beer. This is the third batch I've ever made and I want to expand my horizon a little. I've made a basic Pilsner and a Honey Ale in the past. Today, I'm going with a Belgian Dubbel Ale.
With a kit from Williams Brewing, a couple of five gallon tubs, and a few accessories, I'm ready to go.
First, boil the grain syrup from the kit and a pack of brewing sugar in 3 gallons of water for an hour. Add hops five minutes before the hour is up.
Once the mixture has cooled to room temperature, pour it into the fermenting tank. Add yeast, and let it ferment for a couple of weeks when we'll come back for bottling.
That's all a very simplistic explanation of the process that's covered in a bit more detail in the video above, which takes a 2 -hour process and compresses it to 5 minutes...take a look to see how we got the ball rolling on this batch. See you in a couple of weeks for the conclusion to this report. Cheers! Darryl Copyright 2012 - Darryl Musick All Rights Reserved.
The World on Wheels crew gets out of the patio this week and goes on location to Lucky Baldwin's Pub in Sierra Madre, California just east of Pasadena. There's also a Lucky Baldwin's in Old Town Pasadena. It's the 11th annual Belgian Beer Festival where, in their words, the largest selection of Belgian beers in the world are served on tap.
Maybe, I don't know. But there are 46 taps and 29 of them (on this day) are dedicated to the Belgian brew. The kegs are rotated, so what's on tap today may not be what's available on Monday. I do know that they will be serving around 60 Belgians on tap during the festival, which happens in February and again in the summer.
The way it works is this... 6 oz tastes are $4 with an extra dollar tagged on for the ultra-premium brews. Pints are $7-9 dollars. You can get a package with a souvenir glass and t-shirt for $20. The glass comes filled with whatever brew you want. Come in anytime during the next year, and get a dollar off of your beer. It's not as good as it sounds because the glass is only 12 oz. and they usually sell pints. You can see the glasses at the end of part 2 of the video.
I'd put the entire video up at once, but YouTube only allows 10 minutes at a time, so I have to break it into two parts.
We're wrapping up Wine and Beer Week today to coincide with the opening of the Belgian Beer Festival at Lucky Baldwin's pubs (Pasadena and Sierra Madre, California). If you're in the area, be sure to check it out as you can taste dozens of great Belgian brews on tap at festival prices. We do this every year...we take a cab and have a ball. Also available is a menu of great Belgian specialties like mussels and waterzooie. The festival lasts through the end of the month.
If you see us, stop on by and say hi. Hope you enjoyed Wine and Beer Week...watch for Olympic Week starting on Monday.
